About Me

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Oldies Talk Radio

She had been listening to a radio talk show in the early morning hours. A caller, who sounded distant despite all the improvements in telephone and radio technology, claimed that he had invented a way to receive sounds from the past and stream them on the World Wide Web. She chuckled. He continued. The radio host was going to let him talk. Yes, people’s intimate conversations, Homer’s spoken word performances, the Sermon on the Mount, all of those voices were out there. All that was required was equipment sensitive enough to pick them up and sift them out from the background noise. He used the analogy of the radiotelescope in Arecibo picking up a sitcom broadcast millions of years ago in a solar system long since gobbled up by a black hole. She couldn’t tell if his crankiness was delusional or cunning. She would like to know what Emily Dickinson sounded like, though.